White Sand Moon
by Smif
Summary: She was a soldier once. Then she chose a different road. But somewhere along the way she got lost, and life left her behind. Without a place and a family to define her, what did she have left? Only sand. - post-Shippuden semi-AU
1. Chapter 1 - Daughter of Sand

A/N: It's been years since I read, watched or viewed anything about Naruto, and yet my imagination still floats back to the characters sometimes. After one of those phases I had a terrible urge to talk about Temari, and here we are.

It's probably important to note that I have zero respect for series canon these days, so what I add and what I take away are entirely arbitrary and at my discretion. I picked and chose the bits of post-Shippuden stuff that I wanted to use, but this can be considered an AU for practical purposes - or perhaps more precisely, canon-adjacent. If you see something that doesn't fit with what you know, that's probably why. I wrote this entirely for my own amusement, so that's just the way it is.

This was vaguely intended as a prelude to a longer, more plot-filled story, but I lost interest too soon for that, as usual. Still, I enjoy this piece on its own. Hopefully you can too.

Disclaimer: Yada yada, my words, Kishimoto's world and characters. No money is being made from this nonsense, in case that wasn't crystal clear.

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 **Chapter 1 - Daughter of Sand**

Temari was eight years old when she laid her first killing blow on a human being.

Her training had begun at the age of five, as did her brothers'. As a rule, children in Suna started early and trained hard, and their father insisted that they were to be no exception. There was no time wasted.

So her genin missions began at seven, under the close tutelage of her sensei. She proved exceptionally sharp, intelligent and efficient in following orders, and without mercy or concern when it came to violence. When asked, she said she found it interesting. It never struck her to wonder about morality - after all, she was only seven, and the adults around her told her who to hurt and that it had to be done. Why would you question it, then?

The first person she killed was running in the dark. Their team had been following him for a day, hunting him through the spiny rocks like hounds on the scent. Temari left the others, went ahead, guessing where he would turn next. She guessed right. Waiting for him in the dark she prepared her kunai and her poison darts, and when he appeared between the stones and the shadows she didn't think twice. She spun her fan and he heard nothing, dying silently with a row of spines running across his face, filling his flesh with so much poison that he had no time to feel more than a tingle.

When she had given the signal to her team to say that their mark was down, she left her perch and went to look at him. Blood poured from his cheek, his nose, his eye where all were pierced, but she found herself looking at the hitai-ate around his head, where one of her needles had lodged into his skull through the cloth. She saw the marking on the plate: The symbol of Suna. It was that, and not his death, that made her wonder at what she had done and why.

She never found out what they had killed him for. He had run, they had pursued. It was their duty, and she could only assume that he had shirked his. But she wondered for a long time.

The last time she killed was when she was twenty-two.

After the war, after everything was back to normal, she was working, like always. She took a solo mission to the north of Suna, chasing a missing nin. It was S rank, and Kankurou asked her if she was sure she wanted to go without backup, but she knew having other people along only slowed her down. If she lost, well, then she deserved to. She travelled without stopping for half a week, hunting across the emptiness of the deserts, through heat of day and cold of night. In the silver shadows of the waning moon she chased a stranger down, and when she found him she took off his head with her fan, left his body to be consumed by the desert, and went home. But as she carried the head, bagged and strapped to her belt, she looked at the hitai-ate in her hand, with its symbol of Suna scored for treason, and she began to wonder again.

Within a few weeks she had decided to take some leave. She'd earned her fair share, and since her little brother was her boss she was able to get a few months off, no questions asked. With that she took off alone, this time running east, into the sun.

There was a welcome waiting for her, as she'd known there would be. It was quiet and warm and steady, and that was all she needed. The offer had been made quite some time before, but he didn't seem to care that it had taken her a couple of years to make up her mind. He opened the door for her with a dry smile, and they spent the day in bed while she rested and he ran his fingers through her hair. She asked him, 'How many people have you killed?', but he said he couldn't remember. When he asked why, she shrugged. She was only wondering again.

Temari got married when she was twenty-two. She retired then, too, because changing allegiances from Suna's ANBU to Konoha's wasn't easy, and it took too much political wrangling - besides, she'd had enough of the kind of work that it involved. They bought a house on the outskirts of town, where it was quiet, and she found that spending her time at home and in the garden was actually quite nice. She relaxed, got her hands dirty in the earth and the kitchen, finally got around to learning how to sew like she'd always meant to do. She spent time with her husband's friends' wives, because she didn't really have any friends of her own, not even back home. After not very long she got pregnant, and she found herself thinking - really thinking - about family.

Hers had always been strange and hard. Their father had been too distant and wrapped up in work to much live up to that name, and their mother had been dead before Temari had begun her training; she could barely remember anything about her, just the slight shadow of a smile and gentle eyes. She and her brothers had become a kind of force of nature over time, bound together by ties of pain and anger more than anything else, but she loved them fiercely, and once Gaara had begun to find his way back to them they had grown close. But things never stayed the same for long. They still saw life through the lens of their duties, and she wasn't sure if she could anymore.

Now she was part of a clan, she had been wrapped up in it and adopted by them all, but she didn't feel like she belonged. They welcomed her, laughed with her, gave her their food and their shelter, and yet she sometimes found herself thinking that she was more like one of her brother's puppets than a person when she was with them. She went through the motions, did and said what was expected of her, and when she got home in the dark she was alone again, even with her husband sleeping by her side.

How could she make sense of it? Maybe it was just that she was broken. Lying in bed with the moonlight creeping through the blinds, she laid her hands on her slowly growing belly and hoped that her child wouldn't learn to kill for a long, long time. Perhaps that wasn't the reason she couldn't find a place where she felt right, but then again, perhaps it was. She had no way of knowing now; what's done is done. There was no going back fifteen years and staying her hand.

Sometimes she wondered, as she watched her son grow, what she would have been like in a different place and time. But that was an idle fancy, no use to anyone.

So time went on, as it always does.


	2. Chapter 2 - Mother of Leaf

**Chapter 2 - Mother of Leaf**

Temari was twenty-three when she became a mother.

She couldn't really remember what it was like to have a mother herself, so she'd had to make it up when it came to her turn. Some things were obvious - you figured out how to breastfeed fairly naturally, if you listened to the demands of the child - but some took more thought and intention. Her husband took as much leave as he could, changed over to a desk job while they were learning and so they shared the sleepless nights, but he was a valuable jounin, and sometimes he was called away all the same. On nights like that, Temari would bring her son to sleep beside her, and tell him stories until he drifted off. Then she would lie in the dark, listening to his quiet, easy breathing, and wonder what would happen when, one day, her husband failed to come back at all.

Of course it didn't happen, but each time she found herself thinking, ' _What will I feel when my son goes off to do the same job? Why do we all live like this? Why is it that, even though the war is over, we are all going to die as soldiers?_ '

When her son was five and school finally claimed him, she found her days strangely empty. She'd forgotten what it was like, not having to take a little person with you everywhere, or clean up a dozen different messes a day, or find ways of entertaining them every minute of every hour even when all you wanted was to tear your hair out and cry. She found she had freedom again, and she had no idea what to do with it.

She had passed thirty when she realised that her solution, unintentional though it was, had been to acquire a drinking problem.

It had grown on her slowly. She'd always enjoyed a drop of good sake when the occasion suited it, and after living in Konoha, knowing so few people, she found that a little liquid fortification made all the difference between a painful evening with acquaintances and a perfectly tolerable one. Once their son was born they spent fewer evenings out with friends, mutually too tired to handle such frivolities. But Temari had found that, even after the child had begun to sleep through the night, she could no longer do so.

Often she would waken after only a few hours of rest and be stuck like that, lying in the dark with nothing to do. So she took to getting up in the middle of the night, and when she did, she would take a bottle from the sideboard and go and sit on the back step. There she would listen to the night birds and sip at the warming liquor, hoping that it would make her sleepy enough to go back to bed, but it rarely did. Sometimes she would find herself still sitting there by dawn, and so she would put the bottle away, make breakfast for her boys and get on with the morning as though nothing was wrong. Then, once they had gone off to work and school, she would go back to bed and sleep through the afternoon. It seemed easier that way, because at least when she was sleeping off the liquor she didn't have to go out and talk to people.

The realisation came when she was standing in the kitchen in the dark, searching through the cupboard for a bottle, cursing herself for forgetting to buy more. She recalled that her husband had gone shopping with her that week, and so she hadn't picked up the extra bottles that she usually did on her own. As she stared at the counter top, polished wood gleaming dimly in the starlight, she had to admit that she was trying to hide the habit from him - and if that was the case, then it meant that even she knew that there was a problem.

She didn't talk to anyone about it. To her it seemed like there was no point; if she couldn't sort it out herself, nobody else could do it for her. She made an effort to avoid the excess she had been consuming, and it mostly worked. She stopped buying the extra bottles and recycling them at night when nobody was around to see; instead she would only buy enough to keep something in the cabinet, and would ignore it, even when her insomnia was driving her crazy.

Still, occasionally her will would bend and she would go out late, after her husband was deeply asleep, and take a crate from the back room of the corner shop, leaving enough money in the till. She would carry her acquisition to a high place and sit there, drinking her way through the contents until she couldn't stomach any more, and then vomit most of it up again before heading home. She never got caught doing it, and somehow that made her feel satisfied, because retired though she was, she hadn't entirely lost her touch just yet.

Temari was thirty-two when she began to wonder if she was the only one keeping secrets.

Her son was growing up, and he was kind and strong and clever and she'd never imagined she could be so proud of anything she'd helped create. He was so like his father in so many ways. He had her eyes, though, and her temper, and that always made her laugh. She hoped, silently, that he would do without her gloomy temperament. But he was startlingly good at lying to her, and even though she grew to know his tells and signs, it made her wonder whether that particular skill had come from her or someone else.

Her husband was a good man, no one could argue with that. He was one of the smartest shinobi in Konoha, and for all his attitude he worked hard. She'd watched him go from strength to strength, complaining all the way, and she'd pushed him when she felt he needed it - no longer having anything to work towards herself, but conscious of the goals he pretended he didn't have. She loved him, of course, it would have been silly not to. And yet... He didn't like inconvenience, didn't go out of his way for anything he didn't have to, so it was strange, out of character, when he sometimes got home so late from work.

Once or twice she slipped out in the afternoons and sat in a tree by herself where she could see him at his desk through a window. She never saw anything out of the ordinary, but inevitably on those occasions he would leave work and head home at the time you'd expect. She never managed to see him staying late or going anywhere else.

Paranoia was an ugly thing, and she knew it was stupid, but after his old teammate, the ex-girlfriend, had split up with her husband, Temari couldn't help noticing that the instances of tardiness fractionally increased. There was never any tangible sign, nothing concrete, only a slow fade as time went on of their mutual interest in the bedroom. They had started out with a kind of fire, casual and comfortable though it was, so seeing that wane into absentminded lukewarm apathy was unnerving.

It was probably her fault, she realised too late. Not that she had any control over what her husband felt or wanted, any more than anyone, but maybe she'd driven him to stop caring so much. She had lost her spark with time, maybe once the blood stopped running so freshly in her mind. Did she have to be full of hate and bile and murder to keep feeling that fire for him? She was getting tired. Bored, even. Her son was growing older, didn't need all her attention anymore, and she couldn't spend all her time drinking, so perhaps she needed something new to do, to keep the spark inside her from dying completely.

In her search she joined the academy as a teacher. At least that was a job they didn't need to talk politics to trust her with. She liked being around kids, with all their vigour and energy overflowing all the time. She taught ranged weapon use, showed them how to hit targets at hundreds of metres with pinpoint accuracy. A few bright kids who asked the right questions got showed some of her old moves, and when they asked, she agreed to teach them how to use tessunjutsu.

After a few months of her tutoring, her handful of students were growing increasingly skilled. She found herself feeling the warmth of pride, and for the first time in quite a while it was not just for someone else but for herself as well - she had given these kids something good, something great even, that would help them in their lives. It felt powerful. After dinner one evening, she lay with her head on her husband's shoulder and told him about that feeling, and he ran his fingers through her hair and said how glad he was that she was doing something that made her happy.

A week later, Kankurou came to visit with a couple of other envoys from Suna. He stayed with them for a couple of days, and when they were alone he told her how he was planning on retiring soon. After they had talked about his plans and his dreams, he grew sober again and asked her if the other envoys had spoken to her yet. When she said no, he shook his head and said it seemed bloody stupid to him, but he told her the news anyway. They had found out about her extra classes. Suna had sent an ultimatum to Konoha: Temari was to be removed from teaching at the academy and banned from sharing any more of Suna's hidden techniques, or she would be treated as a political enemy and removed from Konoha altogether.

Within a day, the message had come down from the Hokage's office. Everyone involved seemed to regret it, but Temari found herself without a job anymore, and with a warning not to involve herself in training with any of the Konoha youth ever again. Not even her son was deemed permissible.

Her brother stayed another few days. When her husband wasn't there to offer what comfort he could, Kankurou did his best, sitting with her quietly, sharing tea and talking softly about the past. Temari couldn't help thinking that in the old days she would have fought this, gone back to Suna herself and stood with Gaara and Kankurou and shouted the cowardly council into submission - but somehow she didn't feel like it was worth it anymore. After all, maybe she was wrong. It seemed ridiculous to her to try and hide their old techniques from their allies, but then again, Konoha almost certainly did the same. Such things were jealously guarded. She had trained from the age of five to become proficient with her great fans, and like Kankurou's puppetry, it was a sacred technique of the Sand, a symbol of their country. Maybe it didn't belong in soft, sunny Konoha. Maybe it was foolish of her.

Kankurou went home, where she knew he was going to set his affairs in order and then go quietly into civilian life himself. He'd found a woman, he said, and Temari had been surprised to learn that she was from Konoha. She hoped that the woman would have better luck assimilating than she had managed herself. Kankurou seemed to think she would, but then, Temari supposed her husband would have thought the same. There was no logical reason why not.

Her husband found her another job eventually, helping out around his old girlfriend's flower shop. The woman ran it with her mother when she wasn't away on missions, but her mother was ready to retire, so she needed another pair of hands. Temari agreed, and was taught the basics of how to tend the till, how to handle the flowers, how to check the books for plants that went well together. It wasn't the kind of work she'd ever cared for, but the smells were alright. Luckily her boss wasn't around too much, so Temari didn't have to stare at her pretty face and her svelte figure and her perfect hair all day long. It grated on her nerves, but she appreciated having something to do.

Putting together posies and arranging flowers in their displays, she found a sort of catharsis in plucking out the imperfections. Cutting the dead blooms from the flock, pinching off the ones with crumpled petals or strange, off-kilter growths, it felt somehow clean and straight forward. There were rules to such tasks. You knew what was right and what was wrong. The business of putting together special bouquets was much less to her tastes - you had to be creative there, to see what was aesthetic and try to please peoples' senses. She'd never been so good at that.

Temari was thirty-three when she realised she had no idea what she was living for anymore. She pulled the silky head off a perfect anemone, just because she could, and crushed it under her heel.


	3. Chapter 3 - Woman of None

**Chapter 3 - Woman of None**

Temari was thirty-six when she and her husband decided it was time to stop pretending. Their son had passed his chuunin exams only a little while before, and was going off on longer and longer missions, so his needs were diminishing. They had found that they just weren't remembering to love each other anymore. Sex was almost nonexistent, and sometimes they didn't even talk for days at a time - not out of spite or malice, just an absentminded silence that encompassed both their worlds when they were at home together.

They signed the divorce papers in the registry offices and then walked home together slowly and quietly, both of them musing on the question of how to explain it to their boy.

When he got back from a week long mission to Wave Country, they all sat together on the deck under the starlight, drinking tea. They talked long into the night. He argued and whined and shouted and pleaded and cried, and they understood it all, but things were what they were. His father tried to explain about how sometimes, if you don't pay enough attention, you can fall out of love by accident. Temari ruffled her son's hair and said, wryly but softly, that maybe he should take that as a lesson: The laziness of both his parents was probably the cause. They stopped working hard at their relationship, and so it quietly died.

He was angry with her, but his father laughed and said she was probably right. Then they made more tea.

Kankurou came to see her again as soon as he heard. He stayed with his lady's family, but he spent most of his days with Temari, helping her to pack up her things and think about what she wanted to do. It was hard to come to any conclusions, but all she could think of was going back to Suna. She wanted to feel sand on her skin again, and stand out in the emptiness under the moon, feeling the grandeur of being so small. She missed the smells of the dry streets of her city, the burning heat of the sun that turned everything to dust, and the cold nights that covered even the dust in frost. She'd taken her son and husband there several times since she had moved to Konoha, but it felt different now - she would no longer be just a visitor. She was finally going home.

All the arrangements made, the only thing left was to sit with her son and talk about goodbyes.

They did so one evening when her husband was away for the night, and so the two of them had dinner together and then lit a small fire in the back garden. Sitting beside it, her son produced a bottle of sake, which surprised her rather; but he was thirteen now, legally adult by shinobi law, and it wasn't a very big bottle. They shared it, restrainedly, and talked quietly well into the night.

He was angry with her, of course. She understood that. If anyone was to blame for not making their marriage work, she had to admit that it would be her. She tried to explain a little that after a certain point, love wasn't something you could just fix. It was either there or it wasn't. And although she still loved her husband, it wasn't in the same way she had when she had married him. She had changed, and so had he - although she didn't say so, she couldn't help thinking that he had outpaced her. He had grown up, while she had just persisted.

Her son asked how often he would get to see her, and she promised that she would come back to Konoha as often as he could stand her company. He was more than welcome to visit her, too, although she wouldn't have anywhere for him to stay for a while, having no home of her own to go back to. She said she would set herself up and then send a formal invitation, and he could come and inspect, to make sure the place suited him. Besides, she would email him every day, until he was heartily sick of her - and if he was feeling really talkative, he could email her back once in a while.

They said goodbye on a sunny morning a few days after that. He wasn't the most emotionally vocal boy, but he shared in her tears a little bit, and they hugged very tight for a long time. Then she waved back at him and her husband - ex-husband, now - before she and Kankurou set off up the road, carrying her single bag of clothes and possessions on her back.

Temari was thirty-six when she found herself without a single plan for what was to come. The emptiness of the future swallowed her whole.

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Reviews are lovely. Thanks for reading.


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